Loss and Longevity: Rhetorics and Tactics of Early Modern Women’s Writing

This article assesses the place of scholarship on early modern women’s writing, interrogating the conditions for sustaining, as well as recovering, women writers. The paradigm of loss has been both enabling and limiting for research in this area, capturing the excitement of discovery and innovation but with rhetorical pitfalls that impact upon longevity in the literary canon. The article evaluates various strategies for dissemination of research, also advocating for a set of practices around public engagement beyond the academy. The situatedness and fluidity of the literary canon are considered in the context of women’s writing but also debates around decolonizing the curriculum. Perspective, location, and time are determinants of literary and intellectual value. The discussion concludes by proposing an “action plan,” a set of tactics available to those in the field that might support the longevity and sustained presence of early modern women in the canon of literature as well as the wider community